Immigration Blog

The media are reporting the crash of a small aircraft in East Hartford, Conn., by an alien in pilot training who died on impact. His co-pilot (and trainer) for the flight, now hospitalized with serious injuries, says the act was deliberate. The pilot, Feras Freitekh, was a Jordanian national of Palestinian descent who entered the United States on a visa permitting him to attend pilot school.

One of the reporting media outlets, the Daily Caller, points out that the crash was close to the site of a Pratt & Whitney factory that has been designated as a part of the homeland's critical infrastructure. The FBI is investigating. Read more...

One way of piercing the all-too-effective corporate veil in the EB-5 business is to examine the court records when insiders fight each other.

And what could be more insider-y than the records of the former chief economist of the EB-5 office in USCIS who, after she left the government, was hired by one regional center and then later worked with rival regional centers. Did she remove corporate secrets from the first regional center and then use them to start her own EB-5 consulting business? Read more...

The European Union (EU) announced last month that it would create a border control force consisting of both a land and sea division — in essence a border patrol and a coast guard — to be effective right about now, in mid-October (see here and here).

The announcement comes after a year and a half of endless waves of migrants working their way into Europe, primarily through the land and sea gateways of Turkey, straddling the European and Asian continents, and Libya, on the north coast of Africa. Well over 1.5 million migrants from all over the Middle East, South Asia, and both North and Sub-Saharan Africa have poured into the EU's member states. Read more...

The Diane Rehm Show, a public-affairs program carried by many public radio stations around the country, has a deserved reputation for sophistication and fair-mindedness in presenting competing points of view. But Wednesday's program, where Rehm and her guests discussed the roots of political alienation in the American working class, badly missed that mark.

Instead of an informed and lively discussion of an issue that is reverberating across the electoral landscape, the program gave a forum to an immigration-policy version of Tweedledum and Tweedledee. They were conservative economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin of the American Action Forum and liberal columnist David Leonhardt of the New York Times. Read more...

The Washington Post (and the FBI) have both reviewed the strange case of a Maryland-based imam who is said to have publicly supported ISIS and to have "celebrated ISIS killings and immolations on Facebook", to quote the Post's article, which is titled "Md. imam who backs ISIS is at the heart of terrorism probe".

Suleiman Anwar Bengharsa is the cleric in question. And while the freedom of speech doctrine may cover his advocacy of Muslim extremism, there are other matters, such as this, again from the Post: Read more...

The Center for Immigration Studies recently completed its sixth border tour. Heading north for the first time, we began our trip in Ottawa. From there we traveled east, crisscrossing nearly a thousand miles over the waterways and rolling hills of upstate New York and Vermont and into the lush forests of Quebec. The geography and relative calm of the region is a stark contrast to the rugged terrain and volatility of the U.S. Southwest. But behind the bucolic charm a host of factors are at work to make securing this part of the border just as challenging as the more trafficked parts. Read more...

Louisiana had an excellent idea about immigration/marriage fraud: Let's not let anyone who is an illegal alien get a legal marriage in our state. If they can't get married at all, they can't get married fraudulently.

To that end it passed a law requiring would-be foreign-born brides and grooms to show parish (county) officials that they held an unexpired visa and a birth certificate.

It was the "and" that got the state and this law in trouble. Read more...

A public policy that is hard to understand grants legal migration status if an alien (usually a woman but sometimes a man) can argue successfully that the citizen or resident alien spouse was abusive.

Yes, society should provide short-term shelter for battered wives and issue court orders to prevent the repetition of the abuse; and it should probably extend medical care and counseling to the victims. But instant immigrant status for illegal aliens (or legal nonimmigrants) in this situation, regardless of numerical limitations?

This certainly is a nice benefit for the spouse in question, but is that the way we should distribute our limited supply of immigrant visas? What is the public good that is being provided? Read more...

In an earlier blog posting, I mentioned that during its current term, the Supreme Court will be reviewing and deciding an immigration-related case having to do with birthright citizenship.

But that isn't the only immigration matter that the high court will hear this term. It will also be considering the question of whether the phrase "crime of violence", as used in its immigration enforcement context, is unconstitutionally vague. Read more...

Once in a while the Department of Homeland Security does the right thing about foreign workers — making them harder to obtain by employers who, one hopes, will be forced to hire citizens instead.

This time the issue is whether, as USCIS charges, some of Guam's employers are using the temporary hiring provisions of the H-2B program for unskilled labor to fill year-round vacancies in their workforce. Sadly, this has been the pattern there for ages.

But this move, a potential benefit for U.S. workers, is taking place a full 4,000 miles west of Hawaii, when such actions should also be taking place on the Mainland. Read more...

The Center for Immigration Studies is an independent, non-partisan, non-profit research organization founded in 1985.
It is the nation's only think tank devoted exclusively to research and policy analysis of the economic, social, demographic,
fiscal, and other impacts of immigration on the United States.